The 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting took place in Chicago from June 2 to 6. At the meeting, The ASCO Post conducted video interviews with a range of researchers presenting their findings in melanoma, including:
- Allison Betof Warner, MD, PhD, of Stanford University Medical Center, and Zeynep Eroglu, MD, of H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, discussing phase II findings showing that in patients with BRAF-mutant metastatic melanoma, dabrafenib plus trametinib and navitoclax was associated with a complete response rate of 20% and an overall response rate of 84%
- Jason J. Luke, MD, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Hillman Cancer Center, who presented the final analysis of KEYNOTE-716, which showed that after a median follow-up of 39.4 months, adjuvant pembrolizumab continued to show a benefit over placebo in patients with resected stage IIB or IIC melanoma
- Allison Betof Warner, MD, PhD, of Stanford University Medical Center, and Adnan Khattak, MBBS, FRACP, PhD, of Australia’s Hollywood Private Hospital & Edith Cowan University, who discussed the use of the mRNA-4157 vaccine in combination with pembrolizumab as adjuvant therapy for resected high-risk melanoma, which prolonged distant metastasis–free survival compared with pembrolizumab alone
- Georgina V. Long, MD, PhD, of Melanoma Institute Australia and The University of Sydney, who shared that patients with resected stage IIB/C melanoma who were treated with adjuvant nivolumab had prolonged recurrence-free survival compared with placebo across all biomarker subgroups. The baseline biomarkers most predictive of prolonged recurrence-free survival with nivolumab were high interferon gamma score, high tumor mutational burden, CD8 T-cell infiltration, and low C-reactive protein.
- Omid Hamid, MD, of The Angeles Clinic & Research Institute, who discussed the combination of fianlimab plus cemiplimab-rwlc, which showed clinical activity in patients with advanced melanoma, comparing favorably with other approved combinations of immune checkpoint inhibitors in the same clinical setting. A phase III trial of this regimen in treatment-naive patients with advanced melanoma is ongoing.